


A Spreading Tree

by AntivanCrafts



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Gen, Nonbinary Number Five | The Boy (Umbrella Academy)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-13
Updated: 2019-06-13
Packaged: 2020-05-02 13:04:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19199407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AntivanCrafts/pseuds/AntivanCrafts
Summary: When they were three years old, Number Five discovered that he had a talent for disappearing. The only thing was, when he came back, it was always with a different face.





	A Spreading Tree

Five borrowed his first face when they were three years old. Five and Seven had both been playing a very serious and involved game of puppy, wherein Five was the puppy and Seven was the human who told him what kind of puppy he was and what to do, when she watched him slip between a blue tinged tear in the world. When he reappeared two feet and half a heartbeat later, he had changed bodies the way you would change a pair of socks.

Seven hadn’t known what to do when she saw a stranger wearing Five’s clothes and the exact same grumpy, puzzled expression Five always wore when he got the hiccups. It was only when the stranger put on the very particular way Five had of sucking in his lower lip when she jerked away from him that she dropped her mouth open and wailed.

After that, things happened very fast.

Dad took Five away for a long time, and when he came back, Five was wearing another face. This face was stiff and pale and frightened Seven, until dad explained to all of them that the tall girl in Five’s clothes wasn't a girl at all. That Five was different. That Five had a talent nobody else could do, like how Four could curl his tongue, until Seven understood that Five was Five was Five. Until she opened her arms and let him curl up against her chest the way they always did when one of them had a nightmare.

After that, things slowed back down again until the hours and days blurred together. And, over time, everyone learned their own talents. Everyone except Seven.

Number Four learned, first. He figured out how to curl his tongue so that he could talk to people who weren't there, but whenever Seven tried, she just felt very silly. She had never had an imaginary friend, but as time went on, she spent more and more time wishing she had.

Six was next. He learned how to make the nanny go home sick and not come back. Seven tried that, too, or at least she thought she did. Whenever she tried to think about it her head hurt, so she stopped.

Number Two learned his talent on the same day as One. They'd been fighting again, kicking each other under the table and squabbling about something or other. Seven had long since stopped bothering to remember by then. Later, nobody knew what had happened when, except that a dinner roll Two had thrown at One had somehow whirled around from where it had gone wildly off-course in order to smack into the back of One’s head, and that when One’s foot connected with the leg of Two’s chair, the wood had exploded into a cloud of splinters and sent Two toppling back onto the floor.

Later, everyone laughed, including Seven. It felt better to laugh than it did to think about the brief flash of fear she had seen on Two’s face before it had disappeared from view. The lurch in her chest when Two heard them laughing at him felt just like her belly had leaped up into her throat, like the floor was falling, and her with it. She didn't stop laughing, though, and neither did anybody else.

Three was next, but then again, nobody was really sure when it happened. Maybe she'd actually been first, even before Five. Things had a way of getting swimmy when you talked with Three. It was just how it was. One was shorter than she was, Pogo’s hands curled and tickled against hers, and Three won every game of tag until nobody wanted to play with her anymore. After dad helped Three figure out that her talent worked better when she said the words, it was easier. People wanted to play tag with Three again, but not with Seven.

By then, nobody played with her anymore. She thought maybe they had, sometimes, but it gave her a headache to think about, even if it hadn't made her feel like gravity had shifted and nobody but her had noticed. It was okay, though, because Five would slip in between the folds in the world and visit her. She knew he wasn't supposed to, that dad would scold and punish and reward for doing anything else, but Five did it anyway. That was the talent that she secretly liked best, even if she didn't tell. She'd whispered it only once, when she was sure that Five had fallen asleep curled against her with his face pillowed on her belly.

After a while, Seven stopped trying to learn everyone else’s talents, because she'd learned the best one already: how to spend time with Five. Another talent came later when she found the violin, but that was always second best.

Everything blurred together again for days and months and years after that, the way mom later said it was supposed to. Every day was delineated by morning pills and training and school and visiting with Five in stolen moments. It was like a secret, the kind that made her feel bold and exhilarated and close to giggling every time he came to see her with another borrowed face. The new faces were a smile all of their own, just for her. They meant Five wanted to see her, that he was breaking the rules for her because she was special.

Then came the day when Seven found a magazine in the trash. She probably hadn't been meant to see it, but Two had thrown one of Five’s toys away after a spat, and of course, she had gone after it herself. She knew without needing to ask that Five was far too proud to admit that it bothered him at all, much less dig through the trash to save it, which was how Seven found herself lifting a coffee ground encrusted magazine that screamed their last name and the word ”horrifying.”

At first, she didn't know what she was even looking at. Dad didn't allow magazines in the house outside of the occasional carefully preserved cover, but this wasn't like those. This magazine had article after article about divorces and houses and tragedies, all of which fought for space with full color photographs. To a girl used to textbooks, it was a bewildering assault on the senses. Naturally, she stood right there in the kitchen and read each and every one. She hungrily devoured story after story about lives from far outside of the walls of the mansion, spending long minutes poring over a single photo of a young father cradling an infant before she turned the page. And there, she found the two page spread about their family. About Five.

HARGREEVES PATRIARCH UNDER SUSPICION OF BEING RINGLEADER OF CHILD TRAFFICKING RING, said the headline. Beneath that, was a progression of pictures of some of the faces Five had borrowed. She had to look up some of the words later on, words like ”patriarch” and ”charnel house,” but it wasn't hard to understand the picture they painted. It was just as vivid as that of the father with the kind face and the laughing eyes who had bent to smile at the swaddled child with the unseen face, but this twisted her belly up in a way that felt like being sick. At first, she thought she was.

The article said that the faces Five had borrowed belonged to missing children, and that when he was done borrowing them, no one knew where they went. That dad had been brought in for questioning by the police, but that no one had any proof that what was going on wasn't exactly what dad said it was, or any way to stop it from happening. She read the article twice, then looked at all of the pictures of the faces that were lined up in neat rows. Some of them, she didn't recognize, and assumed that he had borrowed them when she hadn't been there to see him do it, but most she did. There was the chubby-cheeked face that she had kissed until Five had blushed and growled at her. There was the face with the beautiful box braids he had worn the day he'd gotten his tattoo. Face after face after face, thirty in all, though the article said that it was suspected that there were far more.

Seven looked at the faces until her eyes itched and burned, and then she folded the magazine back up and buried it in the trash.

“Five,” she said a few days later when they sat side by side on her little bed, hands just shy of touching as they swung their legs in sync, “do you ever give your faces stories?” She supposed she deserved the look he tossed her way, one eyebrow shooting up while the other dropped in a squint.

“Why would I bother wasting my time doing that? They're just faces, Seven. It's no different than Four trying on Three and mom’s makeup.”

She worried her lower lip between her teeth, picking and discarding different things to say that might fit the yawning hole in her belly where a question was. After a while she settled on something that could fall in it like a dropped stone, but still wasn't the right one at all. “Does looking like a girl make you feel like one?”

Five looked at her with that impatient set to his mouth that he got when she was missing something that seemed so obvious to him. “Seven,” he told her with a sigh, “just because I look like something doesn't mean it's true. Number One looks like he's constipated every day of his life, but that doesn't mean he actually is.”

“Oh,” she said, and, “I guess. I mean,” she added hurriedly, “you're right, that makes sense. Mom told him to eat more fiber once, and it didn't do anything.”

"See?” He looked pleased again, like she'd found the right answer on a test, and she had to look away and play with her hair all of a sudden, because looking at him gave her that belly feeling again.

That didn't answer everything, though, so once she thought her voice would work right again she pressed, “What do you feel like, then? Do you feel like a boy?” She’d expected that he'd look impatient again, but instead Five shrugged and turned away to cup his elbows. Today, the face he wore was older and framed by a halo of tightly wound red curls that she ached to tuck behind his ear, but she didn't. He looked a little lost and a lot afraid. It wasn't a way she was used to seeing him look, or wanted him to. When she reached out her hand, she found his halfway. “Hey. It's okay if you don't,” she said into his dubious expression. “You're Five. Who says you have to be anything anybody else has been already? You never have before.” That was a lie, just a little bit, because she was thinking of the parade of borrowed faces from the magazine, but Five’s expression eased out into a relieved smile that made her feel both guilty and like it was Saturday afternoon early.

“You're right,” he said with one of those laughs he sometimes gave after one of those missions he refused to tell her about. “I always did tell you that you were smarter than I was.”

Seven blinked at him, startled, and felt her face grow hot. She thought about kissing him on the lips then the way she'd seen in the magazine, just for a moment, but she didn't. She was too nervous and the air between them felt too weird, like it did right before heavy rain. She'd have time later on, she told herself.

Only, she was starting to worry after Five didn't come back hours and hours after running away from dinner, after dad had lined them all up in a row and started reminding them of what they would do to prove their loyalty and skill ‘in the face of Five’s stunning lack of it,’ there might not be any time left at all.


End file.
